Children’s and Adolescent Literature

Course / DILL

Stories that embrace: the right to read and imagine

The ALA Literature course explores the world of storytelling as a tool for personal growth, a mirror of the self, and a window onto the world. It is not only a journey through classics and contemporary publications, but also a pathway to discover how stories can be designed to include everyone.

Students learn to deconstruct and reconstruct narrative mechanisms, discovering that children’s and young adult literature is a free space where major life themes—friendship, fear, and the future—are addressed through immediate and universal languages. In this course, reading becomes an act of citizenship and sharing.

Learning Goals

The course aims to train critical readers and potential cultural mediators:

  • Text Comprehension: Strengthening the ability to analyse plots, characters, and narrative structures.
  • Genre Analysis: Exploring the differences between fairy tales, picture books, coming-of-age novels, and graphic novels.
  • Editorial Accessibility: Learning about “special books” (symbol-based books using AAC, easy-to-read texts, silent books) and understanding how they make reading more democratic.
  • Creative Writing: Experimenting with the creation of short stories or original narratives, learning how to convey emotions through words.

Methodologies

  • Dialogic and shared read-aloud sessions: engaging the group through simple questions, comments, and exchanges to foster empathy and active listening.
  • Multisensory storytelling with visual supports: using sounds, objects, images, and gestures to enhance attention and comprehension.
  • Dramatization and role-play: miming actions and emotions, and interpreting characters through short theatrical scenes.

Educational materials

  • Digital tools: Interactive whiteboard (LIM), tablets, voice recorder.

  • Children’s literature books: Silent books, picture books, sequential stories or simplified adaptations, short stories and novellas.
  • Hands-on materials: Real objects related to the story (keys, leaves, fabric, stones, etc.), puppets or soft toys.